The Mamdani era is upon us. Only a year ago, it was unimaginable – an anti-Israel mayor of New York City.
Few could have predicted the election of a veteran anti-Israel activist who believes the Jewish state has no right to exist, and embraces the despicable claim that Zionism is “racist and imperialist,” echoing an infamous United Nations resolution that was spearheaded by the Soviet Union and repealed only after its collapse.
This isn’t the place to analyze the reasons for Zohran Mamdani’s rapid ascent to power. His success plainly owed more to New York’s crushing cost of living than to his reprehensible views on Israel, despite his obvious appeal to the city’s Muslim voters.
But there is an even more remarkable – and troubling – fact than the election of a 34-year-old radical left-wing Assemblyman with no executive experience to manage America’s greatest city. According to exit polls, Mamdani, an avatar of the far-left Democratic Socialists of America, received roughly one-third of the Jewish vote.
There was a time, not too long ago, when a candidate like Mamdani would have been lucky to win one percent of the Jewish vote. He may compare himself to another democratic socialist politician, Fiorello La Guardia, but New York’s longest-serving mayor was an outspoken supporter of Zionism from the early 1920s until the day he died in September 1947, almost eight months before Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948.
La Guardia described himself as an “ardent supporter of the cause of Zionism” and was publicly identified by American Jewish and Zionist institutions as one of their key political allies.
And La Guardia, unlike Mamdani, was a municipal reformer, not a revolutionary – a democratic socialist with emphasis on democratic. His American Labor Party, a New York-based fusion party, was patriotic, pro-labor – and anti-communist. In contrast, Mamdani’s DSA is dominated by ideologues who reject the idea that capitalism can be reformed, and call for its overthrow and replacement with a revolutionary socialist system that is, in practice, indistinguishable from communism.
Not for nothing has the DSA hailed Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution” and demanded the release of its fallen despot, Nicolas Maduro.
The political significance of Mamdani’s Jewish support lies less in raw numbers than in normalization. Jews make up only 10 to 15 percent of Gotham’s electorate, and nearly two-thirds voted for former Governor Andrew Cuomo. But even a minority share of Jewish support served to legitimize a candidate whose views would once have rendered him radioactive.
Moreover, most Jews who voted for Mamdani no doubt prioritized affordability – housing, childcare, basic economic survival – over his anti-Israel record and remarks.
But a significant faction – mainly younger, non-observant Jews clustered in so-called progressive neighborhoods didn’t merely overlook Mamdani’s anti-Israel views; they welcomed them. For these voters, his support for BDS, refusal to condemn the slogan “Globalize the intifada” and his pledge to arrest Israel’s prime minister were virtues, not liabilities.
In other words, they didn’t just find Mamdani acceptable; they found him attractive.
Some of them made a point of invoking their Jewish identity to both support him and denounce Israel’s policies – and even its right to exist.
They represent a new type of American Jew: the “as-a-Jew” anti-Zionist.
Opposing the very idea of a Jewish nation-state and endorsing a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea,” as-a-Jew anti-Zionists typically preface their denunciations of Israel with the invocation “As a Jew” – as if Jewish identity were a moral credential authorizing Israel’s negation.
How did this happen?
Historically speaking, as-a-Jew anti-Zionists are reviving a specifically left-wing tradition of Jewish hostility to Zionism, but they are doing so after three generations in which the centrality of Israel in Jewish life had become a settled fact for almost all Jewish streams, except for fringe groups such as Neturei Karta, which oppose Israel’s existence from an extreme Haredi viewpoint, and the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist Reform group that concedes Israel’s spiritual importance to Jews but denies the existence of a Jewish people. (Satmar, while fiercely anti-Zionist, draws a line at siding with Israel’s enemies, condemning Neturei Karta’s shocking displays of collaboration with Iran’s Islamist regime and supporters of Hamas.)
As-a-Jew anti-Zionists are sort of the Reform, left-wing version of Neturei Karta. They don’t merely criticize Israeli policies; they publicly join movements whose explicit objective is the physical destruction or political dismantling of Israel, regardless of its size or borders.
But their contemptible behavior transcends politics and ideology, requiring more psychological and sociological explanations.
One of these can be found in an essay by the pre-state Zionist thinker Asher Ginsberg, better known as Ahad Ha’am, his pen name. Writing in 1892 amid the pogroms of the Russian Empire, he addressed the problem of Jewish self-hatred in an essay titled “Some Consolation.”
He described Westernized, assimilationist Jews who internalized and repeated antisemitic stereotypes because they were embedded in what he called a surrounding “general agreement.”
When accusations are endlessly repeated within a closed moral community, Ahad Ha’am observed, they begin to feel like proof.
A similar mechanism operates today within the intersectional left with respect to Israel. Among leftists, there is now a general agreement that Israel is a “settler-colonialist apartheid state” guilty of “ethnic cleansing,” “war crimes,” even “genocide.” These obscene calumnies function as the basic moral vocabulary of elite progressivism.
Young Jews eager for acceptance absorb this consensus. They repeat its accusations fluently. In so doing, they curry favor with their left-wing college professors and signal that they, too, belong to the milieu of radical advocacy groups and NGOs.
In his era, Ahad Ha’am found some consolation in the fact that even the most self-denigrating Jews recoiled from endorsing the most grotesque accusation of all: the medieval blood libel. That refusal marked a remaining moral boundary – thin, but real.
Similarly, today’s as-a-Jew anti-Zionists may be comfortable endorsing a political project whose inevitable outcome is the eradication of Israel, but they still reject overt hatred of Jews as Jews. They have not yet crossed the red line of internalizing classic antisemitic fantasies and lies about Jews as such.
They may march to “free Palestine” and accuse Israel of terrible crimes, yet they still recoil from repeating the lurid conspiracy talk about Jews that circulates across the radical right realm of internet and social media sites.
In other words, as-a-Jew anti-Zionists have no problem with demonization of Israel, but draw a line at demonizing Jews. They cheer and make common cause with Mamdani and his DSA comrades – who threaten party members with expulsion if they show even a smidgen of support for Israel – but they are at least still repulsed by neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers, white supremacist Jew-haters, and antisemitic isolationist conspiracy mongers.
That is some consolation in 2026 – slight, and nothing more.
Or, as my grandmother might have said, “Some consolation – and a lot of tsuris.”